Frog in the boiling water: Dying Hinduism

The other day, an old fable about the boiling frog came to my mind. Lets suppose you have a pot with tepid water. If you put a frog in it, it might stay in it. If it stays, you could turn the knob and start heating the water, but very-very-slowly, you would notice that the frog stays in it, does not jump out of it but dies after a threshold temperature is reached. However, if you would have either dropped the frog in the hot/boiling water with the temperature at which the frog dies in the first go or increased the temperature suddenly (rate of change is higher), it would have jumped out and spared its life. Why are frogs so stupid? They keep on repeating the same thing. But why?

Unlike human beings, frogs are cold blooded creatures. They do not have a fix body temperature and they adjust their body temperatures according to their surroundings. The clever human who knows this, exploits this and cooks the frog. Frogs are not stupid, it is their inherent nature to adjust their body temperature as per their surroundings.

[Note: If you disagree with me, please do not hurt the frog, nobody has to prove anything, just say it and I will believe you. Frogs don’t need to suffer because of humans anymore.]

Native Indians i.e. the generations of human beings living between the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean not just for years or decades but for centuries (even Before Christ Era BCE), are not cold blooded creatures like frogs, but have definitely mirrored a behavior similar to that of a frog. They could be called cold brained creatures “Mendak Buddhi” by not being able to see the slow changes but only reacting to extreme conditions or sudden changes. And not just once, time and again they have demonstrated this behavior. Pick a time frame of your choosing and you could see this behavior. Be it during the medieval period where different foreign invaders from middle-east invaded India or during the British Raj or Post Independent India ruled by Congress or even the UPA1 & 2 era, Indians behaved exactly in the same way each time.

All the invaders brought slaughter, slavery, rape, violence, pillage; destruction of religious sites, art and architecture; poverty, exploitation, humiliation, famine, forced conversion, decline in intellectual pursuits, social destruction and a worsening of social ills to India. But still Akbar is ‘the Great’ and Aurangzeb is despised. Why? It is not that Akbar did not massacre thousands and thousands of civilians (other than warriors), or did not built heaps with Hindu skulls or did not take Hindu women as sex slaves.

It is just that he cooked the frogs at a very low flame in contrast to Aurangzeb who turned the knob to the maximum. For instance – his so called religious tolerance was “we will spare your life and not kill you or even give you a job if you marry/trade your daughters with us and of-course you can not marry our women”; it gave a slow, humiliating death to millions of Hindus whereas Aurangzeb was religiously intolerant because he gave a sudden death and took the slaves. The end goal was only one, there has to be only one religion. How do you think a Hinduism was going to survive (in Akbar’s case) if there were no Hindu women to procreate? Glamorizing those invaders and rulers in today’s time shows a submissive, subservient and pervert mindset of a few.

Not only me but Pt. Nehru also thought on similar lines. He himself in his book “The Discovery of India” pronounced Aurangzeb too Muslim to be a successful Indian king: “When Aurangzeb began to oppose [the syncretism of earlier Mughal rulers] and suppress it and to function more as a Moslem than an Indian ruler, the Mughal Empire began to break up.” This is the reason why he followed Akbar and never increased the intensity, he always cooked the frogs at low heat. However, his daughter along with her son in the ’70s made a mistake and turned the knob to maximum. Forced castrations/sterilizations, emergency etc. and many other cruelties caused the temperature to rise above the threshold and the frogs tried to jump out i.e. people reacted and the Indian National Congress for the very first time lost a general election.

We don’t even have to go that far, look at UPA 1 & 2. What was the difference between the two? They had the exact same people, the same prime minister, the same party, the same party president and almost the same senior leadership; what changed? The only thing that changed was the rate of heating. They transitioned from Akbar to Aurangzeb; they got greedy, turned the knob and tried to cook the frogs at the maximum temperature. People reacted!

Some how Indians and Hindus still have a confidence that they, their beliefs (good or bad does not matter) are immortal. They are happy reciting lines like these:

Make no mistake and do not worry, our identity would be vanished one day, sooner than you expect. Whatever you stand for would fall, whatever is your would be taken away. The frog in gradually heating water dies not because of the boiling water but because it exhausts all its energy in adjusting its body temperature to that of the water. And when the frog strains all its energy it succumbs to the weakness; its inability to decide when to jump killed it. India has been losing a part of itself, a part of its soul every time India was attacked, oppressed or Indians failed to decide. Foreign invasions caused the Hindu population to shrink from approximately 600 million in around 1100 AD by 400 millions to 200 millions by the end of 15th century. The British squeezed all the wealth from the country and made India a poor country. Moreover, they took only 90 years to do that. Reason, we were weak but still had some vigor left to retaliate.

In last 70 years, Hinduism and Hindu values were being taken away. Hinduism is being persecuted. Cows are being used to build a narratives. Honesty, trust, non-violence, vegetarian diet have become taboo now. Idol worship is out-dated now; building a temple has become next to impossible. Being cunning is considered smart. Power and a lot of money, that should have been a luxury in life have become a necessity to live a sane life in India. If you don’t believe this, look around. Why are people so obsessed with civil services/bureaucracy? Either you become one or you marry one. Why? It is better to get humiliated within four walls rather than in public. There are more than several thousand women raped and humiliated or men/women murdered every year, the cases are languishing in courts. They are the ones without power or extra money. We are still living in the medieval era, its just the costumes have changed. Who is responsible for building and nurturing such a system? This system was not made in a day or a year or a single term. Please stay tuned for my next blog on how did this system came into existence.

Don’t be a Frog! Choose wisely while you still can, there might be a time where demographics would not let you choose.

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